New Jersey is the fastest-growing film production market in the United States. Its filming count jumped 45 percent in Q1 2026 while every other major market in the country declined. Netflix is building a billion-dollar studio at Fort Monmouth. Lionsgate is rising in Newark. Paramount just signed a ten-year lease in Bayonne. And until now, the state that invented American cinema has never had its own film focused publication.

That changes on April 30.
​
SOCKO!, a new magazine built both for the New Jersey film and television industry and its fans, launches its inaugural issue at the New Jersey Film Expo at Meadowlands Arena in East Rutherford. The issue is titled “New Jersey Now!” and its cover, photographed by Samad Haq, features two-and-a-half-year-old Viva June as a goddess of entertainment, golden lightning bolt in hand, standing at the gates of a new era. It is intentionally symbolic: old Hollywood DNA, young Jersey fire.
ed Publication for New Jersey’s Booming Film Industry Arrives April 30 at Meadowlands Arena

SOCKO! is co-founded by Angela Matusik and Adam Nelson. Matusik, who serves as Editor in Chief, was one of the founding editors of InStyle, held senior editorial leadership roles at People and NBCUniversal, and ran global brand and content at HP. She has produced several award-winning documentary film series including The Big Idea, which won a 2024 Webby, and is co-founder of the Maplewood Film Society. Nelson, SOCKO!’s Publisher, wrote the issue’s cover story, is founder of Workhouse, an award-winning public relations agency, and a professor at the New Jersey Film Academy at Brookdale Community College.
​
“The idea for SOCKO! rose out of a constant drumbeat about how much is happening around film and entertainment in New Jersey right now,” said Matusik. “We’ve seen our charming village taken over by production crews. Everyone you meet is working on a new show, play, or film project. The new studios are rising. One thing is clear: New Jersey deserves its own publication that not only celebrates its historic influence on film, but its new starring role as the heartbeat of the entertainment industry.”
​
“I have spent my whole life at the intersection of performance and storytelling, and I have never seen anything like what is happening in the state right now,” said Nelson. “We named it SOCKO! because that is the sound a great story makes when it hits you in the chest. Which is what is happening in New Jersey right now, the original home of American cinema. It’s waking up after a hundred-year nap. Every great industry deserves a voice that matches its ambition. There is no publication like this because there has never been a moment like this. Somebody needed to be in the room writing it all down. That’s us.”

The inaugural issue is stacked. Nelson’s cover story, “New Jersey Now!,” is a full-throated declaration on the state’s return to the center of filmmaking. Nicole Acosta of the Thomas Edison Foundation contributes “The Mother of All Film Studios,” tracing the story of Edison’s Black Maria in West Orange, the $650 shack where all of this began, and in a magazine born in the same state as the medium itself, the piece reads less like history and more like a birth certificate. “There Is Oil in the Ground” dives into the Netflix studios at Fort Monmouth, the gold rush it ignites, and the warning the state cannot afford to forget. “America’s Greatest Export Is Leaving Home” makes the case for a federal film tax incentive through the Coalition for American Production, the nationwide alliance fighting to keep production on American soil. Barry Lyga profiles legendary producer Michael Uslan, the New Jersey Hall of Famer behind the Batman franchise, in “Life Lessons from Batman’s Protector and Defender.” Nelson sits down with Diane Raver, the woman who built the New Jersey Film Academy, in “The Keeper of Jersey’s Cinematic Flame.” Wilhelm Kuhn profiles master film editor Tim Squyres, Ang Lee’s longtime collaborator, in “Shining Light on the Man in the Dark.” Matusik profiles renowned production designer Jane Musky, the talent behind When Harry Met Sally and Ghost, in “Magic Maker,” and much, much more.

SOCKO! launches at the second annual New Jersey Film Expo, the largest gathering of the state’s film and television production community. Last year’s inaugural Expo drew more than 3,000 attendees and 80 vendors. This year returns bigger, with speaker panels, exhibits from indie suppliers to major studio operations, and a keynote address by Governor Mikie Sherrill. The Expo is hosted by the Screen Alliance of New Jersey, April 30 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. at Meadowlands Arena, 50 State Route 120, East Rutherford, NJ 07073. Admission is free. Register at screenalliancenj.com/nj-film-expo.

Founding partners of SOCKO! include the Edison Foundation, the New Jersey Film Academy, the New Jersey Production Guide, the Garden State Film Festival, and Workhouse.
​
For more information, visit sockomagazine.com.

Gary Hanna and Adam Nelson's sun-struck short takes top honors at Milan, Italy's Absurd Film Festival as the duo prepares their next collab "BUSE!"

"Food for Thought," the surreal short directed, shot, and edited by Gary Hanna and written by and starring Adam Nelson, has been named Best Silent Film at the 9th annual Festival Del Cinema Assurdo—the Absurd Film Festival— held at the Auditorium Centro Culturale "Il Pertini" in Cinisello Balsamo, just outside Milan, Italy.

The film will next screen stateside at the 26th annual Coney Island Film Festival, playing as part of Program 7 — Music Video/Experimental on Saturday, May 2, 2026 at 7:00 PM at the Coney Island Museum in Brooklyn.

Adrift on the Asbury Park boardwalk, a half-starved sailor searches for scraps — of food, of memory, of meaning. Sun-struck and drifting between hallucination and history, he wanders through the ruins of a world that left him shipwrecked. The result is a salt-rusted meditation on hunger, erasure, and the price of progress.

The Absurd Film Festival celebrates filmmakers who dare to be different, challenge conventions, and break the mold, a fitting home for a film built under extreme creative pressure. "Food for Thought" was created for the AP'N3 Film Challenge, the Asbury Park Arts Council’s fiercely inventive three-week filmmaking competition. On Day One, each team received a theme, prop, line of dialogue, and location, the only ingredients allowed. Competing in the On Location category, every frame had to be filmed entirely within the City of Asbury Park’s borders, transforming the city itself into both subject and character.

The win marks the latest chapter in an unlikely creative partnership. Nelson and Hanna first met when Hanna cast Nelson as a subject in University of the Arts – We're Still Here, his ongoing documentary series investigating the abrupt 2024 collapse of the nearly 150-year-old Philadelphia institution where both filmmakers studied at very different times — Hanna as a Film major in the Class of 2004, Nelson as a Theatre student in the Class of 1991.

What began as an interview about the shuttered school became a working friendship, and then a creative engine.

Hanna is an accomplished director, cinematographer, editor, and 3D artist whose multi-decade career spans filmmaking, animation, and digital storytelling. He began at Banyan Productions, assisting on Trading Spaces and Ambush Makeover, before spending more than a decade as a camera operator and live editor at Crystalline Studios, capturing high-profile corporate events with the precision of a newsroom and the polish of a studio feature. As the founder of Psynema, he expanded into 3D animation and game asset production, developing the Houdini-based plugin Hairdini, adopted by mainstream gaming studios and featured on 80.lv. His production credits include a Little Caesars commercial for Current TV and an NHL Winter Classic highlight picked up by the league. He continues contract work with New Pace Productions, New Cape Pictures, and ES3D Studios, contributing camera, lighting, and advanced 3D modeling for Unreal Engine medical simulations and RPG environments. Hanna's work blends cinematic instinct with technical innovation — a restless, evolving artist grounded in story, texture, and the drive to elevate every frame.

Nelson is an actor, writer, filmmaker, and founder of Workhouse, the nationally recognized PR agency he has run for nearly three decades. In 2001 he co-produced The 24 Hour Plays: Broadway for the World Trade Center Relief Fund and was named a winner of the Writer's Digest International Writing Competition for screenwriting. His previous short, Flower, shot on an iPhone during COVID lockdown, won Best Mobile Short at the Berlin Indie Film Festival.

He also serves as Professor and Academic Lead for the New Jersey Film Academy’s Script to Screen program, a workforce-development course preparing students for New Jersey's rapidly expanding film and television industry. The curriculum moves from story development and pre-production through on-set protocols, departmental structure, and distribution, bridging the classroom and the working set.

His debut novel, Huckleberry Jim, was developed over six years at The Novelry under a former Penguin Random House editor, and revolves around two actors trying to hold a children's tour of Huckleberry Finn together — while the country tries to tear them apart.

The Coney Island screening marks the film's Brooklyn debut. Now in its 26th year, the Coney Island Film Festival has been named one of MovieMaker Magazine's "25 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee" and "25 Coolest Film Festivals," with a reputation for grit, whimsy, and an unapologetically independent spirit fitting for a beachside festival whose past honorees include Darren Aronofsky. The fest is produced by the nonprofit Coney Island USA and screens a deliberately eclectic slate across every genre imaginable.

With the Italian win, Hanna and Nelson are already deep into their next collaboration: BUSE!, a factory-inspired comedy that will serve as their official entry in the 2026 AP'N3 Short Film Challenge. Production will begin this summer in Asbury Park, New Jersey.

"Food for Thought" — Awards & Selections
Winner: Best Silent Film, 2026 Absurd Film Festival (Milan, Italy)
Finalist: 2025 AP'N3 Film Challenge
Official Selection: 2026 Garden State Film Festival

Credits
Directed by Gary Hanna
Written by Adam Nelson
Produced by Adam Nelson and Gary Hanna
Cinematography & Edited by Gary Hanna
Original Music by Adam Nelson, in collaboration with ElevenLabs

Key Cast
Adam Nelson - "Sailor"
Edmondo Abbruzzese - "Signore"
Nicole Abbruzzese Nelson - "Senora"
Janet Abbruzzese - "Signora"
Jessica Abbruzzese - "Senorita"
And introducing Viva June Nelson as "Baby"

Interested media contact Workhouse, Account Director, Kat Carlson via [email protected]